Nunes Claro

He was barely out of adolescence when he began to attract attention with scattered verses, particularly in the magazine D. Quixote, animated by Leal da Câmara. It is true that they did not yet reveal great quality; but they were early works that dissented from the aestheticisms of that fin de siècle, sometimes subverting the emphatic conventional figuration of the Poet and, somewhat in the manner of Raul Brandão, extending irony to the clownish self-portrait itself; on the other hand, they were unrestrained in their indignation at the death of Maceo, hero of Cuban independence. The book Charcos, announced at the time, was never published. But, at the beginning of the 20th century, Nunes Claro followed up on his youthful promises, becoming a leading figure of the vitalist and Jacobin current then hegemonic in neo-romanticism: he collaborated in Revista Nova (1901-1902), Arte & Vida (1904-1905) and other similar periodicals; he hosted the «Clárea» cenacle at his home on Rua de S. Marçal, where prominent names of that current gathered (João de Barros, Sílvio Rebelo, Mayer Garção, Ernesto da Silva, etc.); he typified the reaction of this faction to Junqueiro's evolution, replying to Oração ao Pão with the short poem Oração da Fome (1902), which uses the prosodic and rhetorical resources established by Junqueiro to contrast the complicit pacification of the deist song with the pugnacity of a song that is a protest against the arduous condition of man secularly dispossessed of the fruits of his labor and, at the same time, is a generous exaltation of the Promethean goodness of this work in unison with provident Nature. Nunes Claro then represented for his companions the splendid personification of the ideal of a poet-citizen, a sensitive and fiery lyricist, faithful to the dictates of Mother Nature and the duties of sociocultural emancipation. Intriguingly, Nunes Claro gradually published fewer texts. In 1908, João de Barros, still the leader, in an overview of Portuguese intellectual life for La Revue, of Paris, proclaimed him the «most poetic spirit of the new generations». However, Nunes Claro increasingly faded from the literary scene. Although F. Pessoa still considered him, in 1913, one of the three best representatives of the aforementioned literary current (cf. Páginas de Estética e de Teoria e Crítica Literárias), his presence in the second decade was exceptional, as seen in the magazine Atlântida. The same happened in the 1920s, when he lived in retirement in Sintra, dedicated to the practice of medicine and family affections; in 1924, Mayer Garção already evoked him among Os Esquecidos... Finally, in 1928, Nunes Claro published a significant collection, suggestively titled A Cinza das Horas. Afterwards, there was a return to the same silence, occasionally interrupted by a response to the call of one or another periodical (such as the magazine Descobrimento, in 1932). The sonnets of A Cinza das Horas skillfully avoid the impression of monotony and sing, in a delicate register, of the voluntarist dynamic, vital euphoria, naturist lesson, and hedonistic eroticism characteristic of his neo-romantic stance; they relegate nationalistic-Jacobin militancy to a secondary level; they assimilate traces of Franciscan imagery; and, in accordance with the book's title, they allow themselves to be permeated by the melancholic feeling of the erosion of time and the transience of love.